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There’s an Olympic sport that you could easily break your neck doing, it takes flexibility, balance, athleticism…but I just can’t watch it without laughing.

Olympic Trampolining. Super dangerous. It takes a lot of guts to fly 30-40 feet and perform acrobatics untethered over a 10 x 17 target area. But I can’t help but laugh when I watch it. Thinking “Aren’t these the moves we did by mistake in 4th grade gym class while our 70lb 4 ft classmates who would never catch us anyway, spotted us? When they get done competing, do they get to pull out the parachute and run under it as the rest of class shakes it up and down?”

And then there’s the competitor I saw from Belarus. Yes, Belarus has an Olympic Trampoline team. Seems very odd, and unexpected. This female Trampoliner missed her mark on her very first stunt…about 4 seconds after attaining jumping height…landed in the out-of-bounds area, and her Olympics were OVER! In 4 seconds! There was no “finishing of her program.” She was done. Even if you are a lap behind in the 3,000 meters, they let you finish. Not in trampolining. You hit out of bounds, and you are done! And her coach, who looked like a Belarusian Walter Matthau, looked totally disgusted as they sat in the scoring area (like skaters do after a performance). His looks said nothing less than “Are you kidding me? All that time, all that training, all that planning, and it’s over in 4 seconds? Why did we even bother to get on the plane? We could have done this at SKY ZONE!”

I bet he was also thinking “Maybe after this, they’ll bring out the parachute!”